The new front door (that will soon receive a new coat of paint to cover up that blase beige)

The cob walls of the mud room addition are finally complete and all that remains now is to plaster the walls once the cob has fully dried. I’m very happy with how the addition process went and the end result. We’ve now got a great (tiny) little space for storing shoes and hanging coats, and it gives us an extra bit of buffer against exterior temperatures. Here’s a few pictures of the new front entryway of the house…

The new niches alongside the front door are shaped much better than the previous ones, and the bottom one has a little floating wood shelf divider, which is really handy. I’ve projected out the bottoms of the shelves to place candles for summer nighttime gatherings…

I found a perfectly sized curved osage branch for a lintel above the front door. Once I get the plaster on the walls, I’ll figure out how to clean the mud out of the bark to hopefully make the arch ‘pop’ a bit more. The little rectangular box and the round terracotta pipe in the corner are both for ventilation – there is another vent down lower in the space to hopefully get air moving around. Since there will undoubtedly be wet shoes and jackets in the space, it will be important to have good air circulation to dry things out…

The interior door was an interesting frankenstein kinda job. We acquired this old solid wood door from a local reclaimed wood dealer and cut an arch at the top. The door came as is, without a frame or hardware, so we scrapped and rebuilt the previous door frame to fit this door. We saved the arch cutoff and made it the header on the frame, and got some hinges on the door and fit it into the frame.

We had some problems actually getting the door to fit well in the buck – we took it up and down about a half million times, but finally we got something we were happy with. A little shaving and shimming and the door worked fine. It actually isn’t perfectly plumb, so it swings closed unless it’s propped, but I suppose we’ll survive. The knob is just that – it doesn’t have a latch – the door simply pushes open. Once the door is oiled it’s gonna look real swell, I think.

This photo should give you a decent idea of just how small the mud room is. The floor is about 2.5″ total of earthen mix with some Tennessee river stones embedded in the top layer. (April is a Tennessee native, so they have some nostalgia value.) The stones pop up quite a bit from the floor level, so it’s kinda like walking on the riverbed upon entering the house…

Unfortunately, it’s really tight to get a good photo of the wall of the mudroom, so I’ll have to be creative in order to get a decent shot of the shoe shelves, window, and coat hooks… Above the door is a storage shelf, and at the very top of the cob wall is a cutout (about a foot deep) for storage, as well.

There ya have it!

The past week has been extremely productive, thanks to some help from Apple and a few other folks from Sandhill Farm. The cob walls are nearing 85% complete, I’d say. But before I finish them, there are other things to take care of, too. Namely, I need to install lintels above my windows and doorway, and start preparing for the roof.

Lintels are lengths of material (usually, slab wood, pole wood, milled lumber, bamboo, etc.) used to span window frames in natural buildings. They help to bear and spread the weight of the material (cob, in my case) above windows and doorways. Depending on the material, they can be pretty decorative, too.

I cut some osage orange wood for my smaller window lintels, leaving the bark intact for a more ‘raw’ look. I’m pretty happy with the effect.

For my large south-facing window (see top photo), I chose to use some pole wood that I got from Skyhouse. I wanted something straight and easy to work with, but also round, so these fit the bill. These lintels are shorter than is ideal (they only overhang the window by six inches on both sides), but hopefully they will still get the job done.

I am just now starting to think about how the rafters of my reciprocal roof will be placed on the walls, so these next few days will be heavier on the “thinking work” side of things…